1 How to Read a Poem (& Maybe Fall in Love with Poetry)
1 How to Read a Poem (& Maybe Fall in Love with Poetry)
Are Poems “Open to Interpretation”?
That depends on what you mean by “open for interpretation.”
Picture this: A politician says, “I won’t support this bill because it will hurt the middle class.” You hear that and maybe you think, “Yeah, right.
Or this: You ask a professor a simple question about quadratic equations and she spends half an hour tracing the origin of mathematics through the middle ages all the way back to ancient Greece. So you think (but are too polite to say), “This is about math, not about you. Stop showing off.”
What do these incidents have in common? In each case, someone interpreted what someone said to mean something other than or more than what it seemed to mean.
We could multiply examples of this all day. You may have come into this class thinking that poetry (or literature) is unusual in using language to mean more than it seems to say. But in fact language itself can always mean more than what it seems to mean. We are all interpreters of language. Hearing what is not said is something we learn to do from a young age, and it’s a skill we use every day.
To the extent that poems are made of sentences, and all sentences, even this one, are to some degree “open for interpretation,” so are poems. And yet…
- Many students enter this course with a profound misunderstanding of the issue of interpretation with regards to art in general and poetry in particular. Somewhere along the way, you may have picked up on the idea that poems are “completely open to interpretation.” But what would be the point of that?
- What do we mean when we say a poem is “open for interpretation”?
- Two things:
- First, all language, even this paragraph, is by its very nature open to different understandings. (We’ll explore this further in the next chapter.)
- Second, poets (who are artists) often exploit the inherent ambiguities, playfulness, and multiple meanings of language in order to create their art. They do this on purpose, with specific intentions, in order to create multiple meanings and to enrich their art.
- So, yes, understood correctly, poems are “open for interpretation. But
- Not all interpretations are equal. And
- While no interpretation is complete
- Some interpretations are defensible (which is a better word than “right”), and
- Some are not.
We can be more specific: Here are a few problems poems bring to inexperienced readers and ways to overcome them.
- The poem conveys a difficult idea.
Difficulty of this type in poetry is not essentially different than difficulty in prose. Even experienced readers of philosophy sometimes read the prose of a profound philosopher and feel their brains oozing toward their ear canals. Sophisticated, subtle, or specialized language is often difficult. This is not, however, the most common problem in poetry. Solution: Don’t try to figure it out on your own. Ask questions.
- The language is old or arcane.
The words may be unfamiliar or seem unfamilia